(Falls Church, VA) The Center for Equal Opportunity praised the Supreme Court’s decision today to grant review in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case challenging the use of racial and ethnic preferences by the university in undergraduate admissions.

CEO had joined and helped write an amicus brief filed by Pacific Legal Foundation last fall that urged the Court to take the case. In addition, CEO president and general counsel Roger Clegg had published a column last month on National Review Online also making this plea; both the brief and the column had cited recent CEO studies that document the heavy weight many schools give to race and ethnicity in admissions.

Mr. Clegg said, “The Court is right to take the case, because the justices must keep an eye on what schools are doing. Instead of preferences being phased out, in some ways they are getting worse—as our studies have documented. What’s more, as our nation becomes more and more multiracial and multiethnic, it becomes more and more untenable for our public institutions to label, sort, and discriminate on the basis of skin color and national origin.”

CEO chairman Linda Chavez said, “The purported benefits of affirmative action are becoming more doubtful and the high costs are becoming more undeniable. In particular, recent empirical data demonstrate that affirmative action results in a mismatch effect for African Americans and Latinos who are supposedly being benefited but who are, in fact, being set up to fail by being admitted to schools where they are academically uncompetitive.” She noted that CEO’s studies support this conclusion.